Jason Redman, a 48 year old retired Navy SEAL, fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. On his arm are tattooed 30 names “for every guy that I personally knew that died,” he explains. For Jason, the last Monday of May will always mean much more than the unofficial start of summer or a long weekend in which to enjoy some barbecue or score a good deal on a new lawn mower or mattress.

This day of reflection and remembrance of those who died while serving in the U.S. military is observed in part by the National Moment of Remembrance, which encourages all Americans to pause at 3pm for a moment of silence.

The national holiday we call Memorial Day had its origins in the Civil War, which killed 600,000 service members, Union and Confederate, between 1861 and 1865. Its first national observance was known as Decoration Day and took place on May 30, 1868, after an organization of Union veterans called for decorating war graves with flowers, which were in bloom. Waterloo, New York, began a formal observance on May 5, 1866 and was later proclaimed to be the holiday’s birthplace.

David Blight, a Yale history professor, points to May 1, 1865, when as many as 10,000 people, many of them Black, held a parade, heard speeches, and dedicated the graves of Union dead in Charleston, South Carolina. It was here that nearly 300 Union troops had died at a Confederate prison and were buried in a mass grave. After the war, members of Black churches buried them in individual graves — a true act of patriotism that has largely gone unrecognized in the history books.

Closer to home, I’ll be thinking this Memorial Day about 132 young men from Whatcom and Skagit counties who died during or shortly after the First World War. During a recent visit with my friends Bruce McCormick and Sally Rode, Bruce showed me a book that paid tribute to those fallen heroes with photos and brief descriptions of their service and the circumstances under which they gave their “last full measure of devotion.”

The book, entitled With The Colors From Whatcom, Skagit, San Juan Counties 1917, 1918, 1919, was published in 1921 and was an exhaustive effort to preserve “the memory of those noble men who died that America might live.” The book’s foreword describes its undertaking as follows: “The newspapers of the three counties have generously given many columns of space; thousands of letters have been mailed; solicitors spent months canvassing every section; placards, motion picture slides, booths at two county fairs and announcements at American Legion meetings, are some of the many methods used to encourage every ex-service man to give his picture and record for free publication in this volume.”

I encourage you, on this Memorial Day 2023 — a century and half since the holiday’s earliest observances — to spend some time with the pictures and descriptions of the sons of the Skagit Valley who died in uniform. There were a total of 59 who are listed in With The Colors.” The majority died in battle at place names that should be familiar to anyone acquainted with the history of WWI: Somme, Argonne Forest, Soissons, Marne. Most died on land battles, but there were those in the Navy who perished when their ships were torpedoed, while others were tragically killed through mishaps. The business of war is inherently violent, whether or not one is on the front lines.

Many of the men honored in With The Colors were posthumously decorated for acts of valor, and their names live on in through parks and VA organizations. Harry Leon Causland, one of the celebrated “One Hundred Immortals” of General Pershing, is memorialized through the Causland Post of the American Legion and Causland Park in Anacortes. Paul Raymond Heskett and Burton B. Arnold, both of whom died in the Battle of Argonne, share the distinction of having the American Legion of Concrete named for them. Alf Mason, who also perished at the Battle of Argonne, has his name kept alive through the American Legion Post in Conway. The George Baldridge Post of the American Legion in Sedro-Woolley honors the corporal of the 23rd Infantry who was killed at the Battle of Champagne.

The majority of these men who are remembered in With The Colors were killed in action in 1918, and there were also those who were mortally wounded that year but did not succumb to their wounds until the following year in hospitals in Europe and America. One of the honored soldiers, William Low Steward, died in battle in 1914 — two years before the U.S. even entered the war. This anomaly is explained by the fact that he had joined the Black Watch of the Royal Highlanders. Less than four years later his brother James, who served in the same unit (2nd Battalion) as William, died in the Battle of Somme. The brothers had both been born in Inverkeillor, Scotland. Their bereaved parents, James and Margaret, lived in Sedro-Woolley.

Among the casualties were men whose names are familiar to long-time Skagitonians, including Chester Arthur Munks and John Wayne McCormick. Both were casualties not of battle but of the second largest cause of death during WWI: influenza. The “Spanish Flu,” otherwise known as the Great Influenza epidemic, began the same year that the Great War came to an end. Despite its popular misnomer (the earliest documented case was in Kansas) the Spanish Flu was responsible for at least 25 percent of the deaths recorded in With The Colors, and would go on for the next two years to ultimately kill an estimated 25-50 million people worldwide. It’s heartbreaking to think that so many young men managed to survive the brutality of combat only to die from an enemy they couldn’t see.

However else you plan to spend Memorial Day 2023, consider taking a moment at 3pm to reflect on the sacrifice of the men who are commemorated in With The Colors. I’ve included the pages from those of Skagit County, but Whatcom County accounted for even more of the honored dead — and for the families of those servicemen, among whom were the earliest settlers in the westward migration of the mid-19th century, the war that took their sons, brothers, and husbands would never truly end. Like Jason Redman, their names would remain an indelible mark on their hearts if not their bodies.